This week, San Francisco State University celebrates its first 100 years as a big urban factory of higher education. Its rainbow of 27,466 students make it among the most ethnically diverse institutions on Earth, and it might surprise most of its students to learn that the place was almost never born.

The university was enacted into existence by an unenthusiastic Legislature, with barely enough money to keep its doors open. It struggled through decades of political and public indifference, and only became what it is thanks to the vision of its early leaders.

San Francisco State had none of these advantages, but managed to grow with the Bay Area's exploding population and an economy that demanded an educated workforce.

From its beginnings as a humble teachers' college, it has matured into a liberal arts university pursuing a mission to educate the sons and daughters of the working class. Many are immigrants or the children of immigrants, and many are the first in their family to go to college. The average freshman comes from a household whose income is about $40,000, well below that of UC freshmen.

"The school has never been the place where the scions of the wealthy and the powerful come to receive their final polish," said Professor Arthur Chandler in his 1983 book, "A Biography of San Francisco State University". "From the first teacher training classes ... (it) has been a place for working people."

Yet it still gets its share of the brightest. Among its graduates are congressmen and mayors, an astronaut, successful entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers and professionals of every type. And its faculty includes world-famous astronomers, a Pulitzer Prize winner and the recipient of a "genius" award from the MacArthur Foundation.

"Students get a better education here," boasts the university's president, Robert Corrigan. "They are in a classroom with someone with a doctoral degree and 20 years of teaching experience, and there might be only 25 students in the class."

The faculty is hired to teach. Officially, research comes second. A demanding teaching load of four courses is standard. Graduates who look back fondly on their school recall professors with a mastery of their subjects, vivid presentation and an inspiring devotion to teaching.

Academic jobs in the Bay Area are highly sought after, and State can afford to be picky. "When a position opens up," said Joseph Tuman, a professor in the Speech Communications Department, "it often attracts as many as 200 to 300 applicants. The bar has been quite high. The faculty is expected to perform well in the classroom, but research and publications are premium as well."

The 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which created a three-tier system (now including the nine campuses of the University of California, the 22 state universities and the community colleges) gave San Francisco State a secure place in the hierarchy and a more or less reliable source of funding.

San Francisco State has retained one unique feature: a tradition of activism and liberal politics. In the tumultuous 1960s, it climbed onto the international stage with a divisive faculty-student strike that lasted four months, the longest campus strike in U.S. history.

Today, the university has settled into the complacency of the 1990s. The thousands of backpack-toting students disgorged onto the campus each day by bus, streetcar and automobile appear more interested in preparing for careers than revolution. San Francisco State has always been a commuter college. Eighty percent of the students are from the Bay Area, a figure that has remained fairly consistent over the decades.

In 1973, a third of the students were members of minority groups. Today, the proportion is more than two-thirds, representing a dizzying array of cultures.

Political science Professor Brian Murphy returned to teaching after five years as a legislative aide in Sacramento, and found his American government classes full of Vietnamese immigrants, Irish American kids from the Sunset District and Guatemalan refugees.

"I'd never been in a class with that rich a variety of backgrounds," he said. "The students actually learned from one another. It was really quite remarkable."

San Francisco State was born during the Gold Rush as a normal school -- training educators -- to alleviate an acute shortage of teachers. In 1862, it became the first city-funded institution of higher education in the state. But, eventually, it was moved to San Jose.

In 1895, a new normal school was started in San Francisco, attached to the Girls' High School. They separated in 1895, and the new San Francisco Normal School was located on Powell Street between Clay and Sacramento, offering a one-year course of instruction. Its reputation was so bad, some school systems refused to hire its graduates, and the city withdrew funding, according to Chandler. Then supporters petitioned the Legislature in a last-ditch effort to save it by converting it into a state institution.

As usual in matters dealing with San Francisco State, the Legislature was less than enthusiastic. The $150,000 appropriation requested had to be reduced to $20,000 before the bill passed the Senate 21-10 on March 22, 1899 (to be signed into law by Governor Henry Gage). This is the date the university is celebrating as its 100th anniversary.

The new school's first president, Frederic Burk, a noted educator, secured its reputation. His theory of "individual instruction," supplementing class work with self-paced studies, was adopted in schools around the world.

Burk thought of teaching, like the ministry, as a calling. Students he thought lacked the calling were asked to leave. The school's graduation ceremony, held at Berkeley's Greek Theatre, took on the aura of an ordination.

The normal school graduated its first class, of 36 women, in 1901. It admitted its first man in 1904. Not until the 1930s did men begin enrolling in significant numbers.

When the Powell Street building was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, the school moved to an abandoned orphanage chapel at Waller and Buchanan streets. Together with some wooden structures, that would be the campus for the next two decades. Later, a handsome Mission-style building was added that survives today as part of University of California extension.

Burk died in 1924 and was replaced in 1927 by Alexander Roberts, who introduced the traditional trappings of a college: sports teams, fraternities and a liberal arts curriculum. In 1935, it became San Francisco State College.

"It was a serious place," recalled Paul Scholten, class of 1943, now a retired physician. "People were there for a purpose. Most of them were going to college in order to be a teacher. The art students wanted to be art teachers, the music students to be music teachers and the athletes to be physical education teachers and coaches."

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In 1938, Roberts persuaded the Legislature to purchase 53 acres of city-owned sand dunes near Lake Merced for a campus of 3,500 students. World War II reduced the student body to fewer than 800, and plans were put on hold.

After the war, Roberts was succeeded by J. Paul Leonard, who realized that the influx of returning veterans called for a campus that would accommodate 10,000.

Leonard set his sights on land surrounding Lake Merced, including property owned by Henry and Ellis Stoneson. The brothers wanted to build apartments and a shopping center near the college site and persuaded the Board of Supervisors to oppose Leonard's plan in Sacramento.

When Leonard went to City Hall to discuss the matter with Mayor Roger Lapham, a group of students showed up in moral support. It was a tepid protest by later standards. When the mayor gave them the cold shoulder in the City Hall rotunda, the students sang the school song and left.

The bill to buy the land was narrowly defeated in the Legislature, but the money was quietly slipped into a later bill. The college got its campus and the brothers their Stonestown Shopping Center.

By the early 1950s, there was a smattering of minority students, but a group of liberal faculty, including education professor Duncan Gillies, were looking for ways to attract more. One day, Gillies was visited by a young man from Mineola, Texas, named Willie Brown, who wanted his help in getting into Stanford. Gillies, according to Brown, suggested that he come to State. The segregated schools of Texas had not prepared Brown for college work, so he was admitted on probationary status. He struggled with the school work at first, but did so well he went on to law school.

In the student cafeteria, Brown met John Burton, a basketball player. Brown, Burton and his brother Phil formed one of the nation's most powerful Democratic machines.

The postwar years saw dramatic growth at San Francisco State. The baby boom generation reached college in 1964, and San Francisco State suddenly had 12,000 students. This jumped to 18,000 in 1968, then to nearly 25,000 in 1973.

Student activism picked up steam. When student demonstrators disrupted a City Hall hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1960, police turned fire hoses on them.

Each summer in the mid-1960s, flames of urban riots rose in cities across the country. Black students began to assert themselves. The Vietnam War exposed raw emotions in the country. One of the first ways discontent expressed itself at San Francisco State was the experimental college, governed by the Associated Students. Virtually anyone was allowed to teach almost any subject. About 2,000 students attended mostly non-credit courses, with titles like "Utopian Metaphysics and Three-Fold Forces." A "Seminar in Guerrilla Warfare" drew the most controversy.

Conflict began in earnest in spring 1967, when anti-war students demanded the university stop cooperating with the Selective Service. A group of black students was suspended for assaulting the editor of the Golden Gater, the school newspaper. The campus cry was "Shut it down!"

With the campus in turmoil, the state Board of Trustees demanded the resignation of university president John Summerskill and replaced him with Robert Smith.

Then George Murray, an English instructor and minister of education of the Black Panther Party, urged black students to "kill all the slave masters," a statement interpreted to include Governor Ronald Reagan, Chief Justice Earl Warren and President Lyndon Johnson.

Murray was suspended, and black student groups submitted to the administration lists of "non-negotiable demands" that included his reinstatement. Caught between the militant students and conservative trustees, Smith resigned and was replaced by semanticist S.I. Hayakawa.

Taking a hard line, Hayakawa called in San Francisco police, and there were daily clashes with demonstrators. Among those arrested was a young lawyer, Terence Hallinan, now San Francisco's district attorney. He was booked for assaulting a police officer but was later acquitted.

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The image of the strike that would be seared into the public consciousness occurred on Dec. 2, 1968. Hayakawa, wearing his trademark knit tam-o'-shanter, pushed his way through a line of pickets and tried to seize a microphone from students inside a sound truck.

Unable to grab the mike, he mounted the back of the truck to exhort students to return to class. Objects were hurled at him and he was smacked in the face with a gym bag. Drowned out by a student chanting "On strike! Shut it down!" on the mike, Hayakawa reached down and yanked the wires from the speakers.

That moment made Hayakawa a hero to those who viewed student radicals as ungrateful for their tax-supported education. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972.

There was a "silent majority" of students on campus who opposed the strike, but perhaps a greater number who didn't participate but approved of the strike's ultimate goals of racial equality and peace. Among them was Ken Fong, the son of a cook who had emigrated from Hong Kong two years earlier.

"It was fascinating to me," recalled the 1971 graduate. "I had not been fully acculturated. I had never seen anything like it. There was no student movement in Hong Kong."

But Fong was more fascinated with genetics. Instead of striking, he isolated DNA in a university laboratory. Today, he is CEO of Clontech Laboratories in Palo Alto, one of the country's fastest-growing privately held biotech companies.

After the strike, the campus never quite slipped back to the days of letter men's sweaters. In 1995, the football team was disbanded after years of declining attendance.

But academics remain strong. The school has a national reputation in poetry, theater arts, film, journalism and a variety of other subjects.

"There's a lot of diversity in terms of areas of study. There are strong departments," said Yvonne Cagle, a 1981 graduate. Cagle grew up in Novato, one of six children, four of whom went to State. After medical school, she joined the Air Force and is now an astronaut for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration awaiting construction of the international space station, where she will conduct medical research.

A bright young physicist and astronomer, Geoff Marcy, was hired in 1984, and soon hooked up with one of his eager undergraduate students, Paul Butler. In 1996, they announced to the world the discovery of two planets orbiting distant stars. They have so far discovered 12 planets.

In 1989, engineering Professor Ralf Hotchkiss won a $260,000 MacArthur Foundation grant for the manufacture in the Third World of low-tech wheelchairs. Another professor, Wayne Peterson, won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for music.

In 100 years, San Francisco State has awarded 185,020 degrees. Last year, it graduated its largest class ever, 5,340 students. Within 83 academic departments, it grants bachelor's degrees in 115 specialties and master's degrees in 93. Today, fewer than 5 percent of the students receive degrees in education.

The university still admits students graduating in the top third of their high school class, although the children of the baby boom generation, who will be arriving by the thousands in the next few years, may strain that mandate.

President Corrigan, in his 11th year, must find ways to make room for them on the campus, the smallest in the state university system.

San Francisco State's tumultuous history is lost on its young students. Last month, Helene Whitson, State's archivist, was entertaining a reporter and a photographer of the school paper in her crowded office. She dug out numerous artifacts for them, including the shovel that broke ground for the Lake Merced campus.

"All of a sudden, I remembered (Hayakawa's) tam," recalled Whitson. "I got up on my ladder, opened the archives box, pulled it out, and climbed down. I asked them if they knew what it was." They didn't.

1855 -- To improve the quality of teaching in San Francisco schools, a normal school is set up. At first, classes are held Saturday morning, with attendance mandatory. Later, the classes are moved to Monday evening.

May 5, 1862 -- In response to lobbying from San Francisco teachers, Governor Leland Stanford signs into law a bill appropriating $3,000 to convert the normal school into the first state-sponsored institution of higher education in California, the California State Normal School.

1871 -- At the urging of state superintendent of public instruction Oscar Fitzgerald and a local railroad line, the normal school is moved to San Jose.

1895 -- The Girls' High School in San Francisco and the normal school school separate. The new institution is named the San Francisco Normal School.

March 22, 1899 -- The state Senate gives final passage on a 21-19 vote to establish the San Francisco State Normal School. The bill is signed by Governor Henry Gage.

Aug. 14, 1899 -- 1901 -- The school graduates its first class, 36 women. Frederic Burk, a pioneering educator, is named the school's first president.

April 18, 1906 -- The school, located on Powell Street near Clay Street, is destroyed in the earthquake and fire that levels much of San Francisco.

1934 -- The school's third president, Alexander Roberts, asks the Legislature to purchase 53 acres of city-owned land near Lake Merced as a new campus.

1935 -- The school's name is changed to San Francisco State College, and a liberal arts curriculum is introduced.

1939 -- Ground is broken for the Lake Merced campus, but construction is delayed by World War II.

1945 -- J. Paul Leonard, a Stanford professor of education, becomes the college's fourth president, spearheading construction of an ambitious new campus that will eventually hold more than 27,000 students and a faculty and staff of more than 3,000.

February 1947 -- Leonard, accompanied by student body president Izzy Pivnik, goes to City Hall to meet with Mayor Roger Lapham over the city's opposition to acquiring more land for a campus. Hundreds of students demonstrate outside, one of the first protests in the school's history. When the mayor rebuffs the students, they sing the school song and leave.

1949 -- San Francisco State College begins offering master's degrees.

1960 -- The state adopts the Master Plan for Higher Education, making San Francisco State one of several state colleges. Police use fire hoses on students disrupting a hearing of the House Un-American Actitivities Committee.

Nov. 6, 1968 -- A student strike, led by the Black Students' Union and the Third World Liberation Front, begins.

March 21, 1969 -- A settlement is announced in the strike, both sides claiming victory. The administration retains control of hiring and admissions, and the students get a School of Ethnic Studies and an expanded Black Studies Department.

1974 -- The name is changed again, to San Francisco State University (what most people had been calling it anyway).

1988 -- Robert Corrigan, formerly chancellor of the University of Massachusetts, in Boston, and an authority on the poet Ezra Pound, becomes the university's 12th president.

1999 -- The university celebrates its centennial, with the theme "A 100 Years of Opportunity."

PHOTO CAPTIONS:

(1) 1940 -- The entrance to the Buchanan Street campus. The fanciful marble mosaic is the work of Maxine Albo. (2) 1928 -- The administration building. The college would be mostly a collection of ramshakle wooden buildings and students would spend years protesting their delapidated campus. (3) 1911 -- Two graduates decked out in gowns for the 1911 graduation ceremomy, called The Ritual of the Teachers' Guild Service. (4) Willie Brown with friends in 1955, during his San Francisco State student days / Courtesy of San Francisco State University archives. (5) 1899 -- Frederick Burk, an innovator in education, was the school's first president, serving from 1899 to his death in 1924. (6) 1906 -- School destroyed in quake. (7) 1930s -- The student cafeteria on Buchanan Street was a crowded place at lunchtime. A glass of buttermilk sold for 5 cents. (8) 1939 -- College president Alexander Roberts, posing here near 19th Avenue, persuaded the Legislature to purchase 53 acres near Lake Merced. (9) 1939 -- The pep squad included George Fenneman, center, who would later go on to a career as an actor and announcer. (10) 1968 -- During the strike, S.I. Hayakawa refused flowers offered by a protester. (11) 1999 -- At 100 years old, San Francisco State University is one of the most ethnically diverse institutions in the world. (12) In a widely documented moment during the 1968-'69 strike, school President S.I. Hayakawa climbed atop a sound truck and, while grappling with protesters and dodging flying objects, exhorted students to return to class. (13) Student Catarina Negrin, 24, sat on "The Wall," near the campus library, a popular place to study. (14) After the original campus was destroyed in 1906, the school moved to an abandoned orphanage chapel at Buchanan and Waller streets, shown here in 1910.